Publication: Providing Artifact Awareness to a Distributed Group through Screen Sharing

Despite the availability of awareness servers and casual
interaction systems, distributed groups still cannot maintain
artifact awareness – the easy awareness of the documents,
objects, and tools that other people are using – that is a natural
part of co-located work environments. To address this deficiency,
we designed an awareness tool that uses screen sharing to provide
information about other people's artifacts. People see others'
screens in miniature at the edge of their display, can selectively
raise a larger view of that screen to get more detail, and can
engage in remote pointing if desired. Initial experiences show that
people use our tool for several purposes: to maintain awareness of
what others are doing, to project a certain image of themselves, to
monitor progress and coordinate joint tasks, to help determine
when another person can be interrupted, and to engage in
serendipitous conversation and collaboration. People have also
been able to balance awareness with privacy, by using the privacy
protection strategies built into our system: restricting what parts
of the screen others can see, specifying update frequency, hiding
image detail, and getting feedback of when screenshots are taken.